“There are two types of people on planet Earth, Batman and Iron Man. Batman has a secret identity, right? So Bruce Wayne has to walk around every second of every day knowing that if somebody finds out his secret, his family is dead, his friends are dead, everyone he loves gets tortured to death by costumed supervillains. And he has to live with the weight of that secret every day. But not Tony Stark, he's open about who he is. He tells the world he's Iron Man, he doesn't give a shit. He doesn't have that shadow hanging over him, he doesn't have to spend energy building up those walls of lies around himself. You're one or the other - either you're one of those people who has to hide your real self because it would ruin you if it came out, because of your secret fetishes or addictions or crimes, or you're not one of those people. And the two groups aren't even living in the same universe.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“I know the Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider can't fly because if it could, it would have a different name entirely. We would call it "sir" because it would be the dominant species on the planet. None of us would leave the house unless a Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider said it was okay”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“SHUT UP. Both of you. You're coming with me." To me he said, "Put some pants on."
"Fuck you. This is my house. I make the rules. You take your clothes off. John, get the Twister mat.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“The zombie looks like a man, walks like a man, eats and otherwise functions fully, yet is devoid of the spark. It represents the nagging doubt that lays deep in the heart of even the most zealous believer: behind all of your pretty songs and stained glass, this is what you really are. Shambling meat. Our true fear of the zombie was never that its bite would turn us into one of them. Our fear is that we are already zombies.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“What humans want most of all, is to be right. Even if we're being right about our own doom. If we believe there are monsters around the next corner ready to tear us apart, we would literally prefer to be right about the monsters, than to be shown to be wrong in the eyes of others and made to look foolish.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces, restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can’t see around walls, we can’t see heat or cold, we can’t see electricity or radio signals, we can’t see at a distance. It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it, yet we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied. We have wound up with the utterly mad and often fatal delusion that if we can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Virtually all of civilization’s failures can be traced back to that one ominous sentence: ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ We can’t even convince the public that global warming is dangerous. Why? Because carbon dioxide happens to be invisible.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“Falling in love with a house or a car or a pair of shoes, it was a dead end. You save your love for the things that can love you back.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“The English language needs a word for that feeling you get when you badly need help, but there is no one you can call because you're not popular enough to have friends, not rich enough to have employees, and not powerful enough to have lackeys. It is a very distinct cocktail of impotence, loneliness and a sudden stark assessment of your non-worth to society? Enturdment?”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“He made the engine growl and told the headlights to fuck the night.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“Nobody involved in a conflict thinks they’re the villain.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“Amy hated--hated--the way the grown-ups her parents had surrounded themselves with were so quick to offer prayers and so low to actually do anything. Old women who barely left the house for anything but bingo and congratulated themselves on never drinking alcohol or saying dirty words, thinking God created humans to stay home and watch televangelists and just run out the clock until the day they die. Well, Amy figured you don't need more than five minutes on this planet to figure out that one thing we know about God--maybe the only thing--is that he favors those who act. David also believed that, through he didn't realize it.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“John and I have made this stuff our hobby, in the way that an especially attractive prisoner makes a hobby out of not getting raped. Jesus, that’s a terrible analogy. I apologize. What I’m saying is that it’s self-preservation. We didn’t choose this, we just have talents that makes us the equivalent of that new guy in the cell block who has a slim, hairless body and kind of looks like a woman from behind, and has an incredibly realistic tattoo of boobs on his back. He may have no desire at all to ever even touch a penis, but it’s going to happen, even if it’s just in the process of frantically slapping them away. Jesus, am I still talking about this? [John—please delete the above paragraph before it goes off to the publisher].”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“John cursed himself. Or rather, he
cursed the past version of himself for so
thoughtlessly screwing over the current
version of himself.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“Congratulations, now you know the single reason why the world is the way it is. You see the problem right away—everything we do requires cooperation in groups larger than a hundred and fifty. Governments. Corporations. Society as a whole. And we are physically incapable of handling it. So every moment of the day we urgently try to separate everyone on earth into two groups—those inside the sphere of sympathy and those outside. Black versus white, liberal versus conservative, Muslim versus Christian, Lakers fan versus Celtics fan. With us, or against us. Infected versus clean. “We simplify tens of millions of individuals down into simplistic stereotypes, so that they hold the space of only one individual in our limited available memory slots. And here is the key—those who lie outside the circle are not human. We lack the capacity to recognize them as such. This is why you feel worse about your girlfriend cutting her finger than you do about an earthquake in Afghanistan that kills a hundred thousand people. This is what makes genocide possible. This is what makes it possible for a CEO to sign off on a policy that will poison a river in Malaysia and create ten thousand deformed infants. Because of this limitation in the mental hardware, those Malaysians may as well be ants.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“I was going back and reading Marconi’s last book again, and there’s this part that
always gets me. He points out that the amount of the universe a human can experience is
statistically, like, zero percent. You’ve got this huge universe, trillions of trillions of miles of empty
space between galaxies, and all a human can perceive is a little tunnel a few feet wide and a few feet
long in front of our eyes. So he says we don’t really live in the universe at all, we live inside our
brains. All we can see is like a blurry little pinhole in a blindfold, and the rest is filled in by our
imagination. So whatever we think of the world, whether you think the world is cruel or good or
cold or hot or wet or dry or big or small, that comes entirely from inside your head and nowhere
else.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“My shame circuits burned out from overuse years ago.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“ANYBODY ORDER A JAILBREAK WITH A SIDE OF SHOTGUN?”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“Damn it! I knew she was a monster! John! Amy! Listen! Guard your buttholes.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“John. I would ask you what you are doing, but I fear you would actually tell me.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“Our little tribal circles, bound by social contracts and selfish mutual need. Everyone working in their own greedy self-interests and huddling together with their tribe, at war with all those outside who they regard as barely human. What breaks a human mind out of that iron cage of mistrust, is a sacrifice. The martyr who gives up everything, who abandons all personal gain, who lays down his life for the good of those outside his group. He becomes a symbol all can rally around. So instead of trying to make a selfish, violent primate somehow empathize with the whole world, which is impossible, you only need to get him to remember and love the martyr. As one is forgotten, another must replace it.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“...the amount of the universe a human can experience is statistically, like, zero percent. You’ve got this huge universe, trillions of trillions of miles of empty space between galaxies, and all a human can perceive is a little tunnel a few feet wide and a few feet
long in front of our eyes. So he says we don’t really live in the universe at all, we live inside our brains. All we can see is like a blurry little pinhole in a blindfold, and the rest is filled in by our imagination. So whatever we think of the world, whether you think the world is cruel or good or cold or hot or wet or dry or big or small, that comes entirely from inside your head and nowhere
else.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“He gave me a look that would have made cancer apologize, then ran like hell.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“I said, "And then, when those all-American Joes get out and some of them fucking turn into monsters? What happens then?"
Amy said, "Then we will once again err on the side of not letting people be murdered. You take the choice in front of you, and then you keep picking the non-murder choices as long as you can.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“Tried to escape, to block out the fact that I was being eaten alive by arachnids. For some reason the only thing I could replace it with was the image of being eaten by tiny clowns.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“I am not the star of a zombie movie. I am the guy in the background who gets eaten in the first montage.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“THE END IS NOT NEAR
IT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED
WE JUST DIDN'T CARE”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“A realization washed over her in that cold, dark space: this was how virtually all living things born on earth have died—with teeth tearing through their muscle and bones. We humans have computers and soap and houses but it doesn't change the fact that everything that walks is nothing but food for something else.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“John’s old Caddie had a huge engine that would qualify as a human rights violation if built today. It roared down the road, chugging gas and farting a blue cloud of dinosaur souls.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“He points out that the amount of the universe a human can experience is statistically, like, zero percent. You’ve got this huge universe, trillions of trillions of miles of empty space between galaxies, and all a human can perceive is a little tunnel a few feet wide and a few feet long in front of our eyes. So he says we don’t really live in the universe at all, we live inside our brains. All we can see is like a blurry little pinhole in a blindfold, and the rest is filled in by our imagination. So whatever we think of the world, whether you think the world is cruel or good or cold or hot or wet or dry or big or small, that comes entirely from inside your head and nowhere else.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“Okay, can somebody quickly just summarize for the shotgun department who it's okay and not okay to shoot?”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
David Wong
Born place: in Lawrenceville, Illinois, The United States
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“Daffodil bulbs instead of balls
Stared from the sockets of the eyes!
He knew that thought clings round dead limbs
Tightening its lusts and luxuries.”
― T.S. Eliot, quote from Collected Poems, 1909-1962
“Hey, I have a weird question,” I said. “What does it mean if a guy calls you ‘bang tidy’?”
Marna snorted. “Sounds like something a dirty wanker would say. Or someone pissing about.”
Now it was my turn to snort, because she’d called Kai a wanker.”
― Wendy Higgins, quote from Sweet Peril
“She emptied herself of Fabio and of herself, of all the useless efforts she had made to get where she was and find nothing there. With detached curiosity she observed the rebirth of her weaknesses, her obsessions. This time she would let them decide, since she hadn't been able to do anything anyway. Against certain parts of yourself you remain powerless, she said to herself, as she regressed pleasurably to the time when she was a girl.”
― Paolo Giordano, quote from The Solitude of Prime Numbers
“There is no such thing as a clean slate. I know that now. You just embrace your dirty slate and build over it.”
― Tarryn Fisher, quote from Thief
“He was brilliant sunlight that drove away winter's chill.”
― Andrea Cremer, quote from Wolfsbane
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Farnham's FreeholdBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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